Magazine Capacity and Reality

The good folks at Gun Values Board have been kind enough to feature my latest article on the wisdom and necessity of having magazines of sufficient capacity, and plenty of them. If you have a minute, it may be worth your time.

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3 thoughts on “Magazine Capacity and Reality”

The woman you describe fired 6 shots and hit him 5 times.
He happened to fall back, but was able to get to his car and drive away.
He has asked her to stop shooting, but it seems he could equally have attacked her had he a mind to.

The 30-round mag is a version of “shoot to stop” in which the technique is to get so many rounds into the target that their legs can no longer carry the sheer weight of the metal inside them.
That technique is problematical if the target is so close that there is not time to empty the 30 rounds into them – and so close that the rounds pass through them.

This would indicate that better shooting skills would be appropriate.

A SWAT team fires 71 rounds – and hits the guy 22 times – but only 3 times in “centre mass”? And they stop shooting only because their guns malfunction or are out of ammo. FFS!

Presumably a SWAT team has specialist training – or at least better than that of the average houswife.
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The main rationale for high-capacity mags seems to be that people (including SWAT teams) can’t shoot for crap. They need to be able to spray large numbers of rounds in the general direction of the target in the hope that one or two will hit the target somewhere it matters.
So you are getting into the territory of those NYPD cops who shot a large number of bystanders.

If a 6-round revolver is inadequate to protect a woman and two children, does this not mean that teachers in schools should be armed with rifles and 30-round mags?
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You closing *anecdote* is interesting in that it holds that *most* of the 2.5 million did not have to actually fire a shot. They could have had a zero-round mag.

Thanks for your comments, as always. One always hopes for a 100% hit rate, but in actual shootings, that’s quite rare, even for the best shooters. I included the SWAT shooting to illustrate that very point. In that situation five officers–supposedly the best their four agencies had to offer–fired in a blind panic in the face of no provocation at all, and actually ventilated the neighborhood.

As I point out in the article, the primary reasons for sufficient quantities of ammunition are that we can never know when we might find it necessary to defend our lives or the lives of others, and in such defense, we can never know how many assailants we’ll face or how many bullets, even if not a single round misses, will be required to stop their unlawful assault. Recognizing that shooting with target range precision is difficult in a deadly force encounter does not diminish the reality that one might very well need every round in a 17 or 30 round magazine to survive. And of course no one advocates “spraying” many rounds rather than shooting accurately.

Regarding those NYC cops, my articles on that event (here and here)point out that their poor marksmanship was due in part to bad tactics, poor tactical and marksmanship training, and a very poor choice of equipment as they were required to have very heavy triggers in their guns, triggers their bosses no doubt consider “safer” than standard triggers, but which turned out to be quite the opposite in a real deadly force encounter.

My inclusion of the 2.5 million figure illustrates that not every encounter requires shooting, but again, the main point is that one never knows when it will, and how many rounds will be required. In such matters, it is always far better to have what you need and not need to use it rather than not having sufficient resources in the first place.

“:Recognizing that shooting with target range precision is difficult in a deadly force encounter does not diminish the reality that one might very well need every round in a 17 or 30 round magazine to survive. And of course no one advocates “spraying” many rounds rather than shooting accurately.”

The closest thing I can identify to that scenario is a full on fire fight, which is a few levels above “home defense”. As you mentioned in a previous dialogue we had, most “criminals” (by which I mean the ones NOT interested in offing themselves after they are empty) are not bright, could be described as cowardly, and at the core, are opporitunists. Even with multiple attackers, if criminal A is struck by a bullet, and begins a retreat, what usually happens to his accomplices B C and D? (I refer to the “cyber cafe/casino attempted Robbery in Florida not to long ago).

If it is your contention to say that small organized roving hit squads are the norm for breaking into homes, necessatating (sp?) auto, or hi-caps, then I could imagine why you would feel that everyone needs an assault rifle, but barring the entire breakdown of western civilization as we know it (SHTF, I believe its called on some sites), a shot gun or handgun has been able to satisfy the vast majority of break ins.